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Abby — the thirty-year-old protagonist — has abandoned a brief career as a model in New York City to return with her new husband to Bantam, the small upstate New York town where they both grew up. When her husband dies unexpectedly, Abby tries to cope by going back to her old job at the InnBetween, the town’s busiest restaurant — minding her own business and avoiding everyone else’s. But when someone starts taking her boss’ minivan for unauthorized midnight jaunts, Abby reluctantly agrees to help find the culprit. Against her will she becomes entangled in a growing puzzle — soon the plumber’s bad girl daughter goes AWOL and a woman Abby just met is found shot to death. And to complicate matters, she is attracted to a man who seems to have secrets of his own. Trying to find answers while working nights at the restaurant and days transcribing for an irritating screenwriter, she follows the trail. Unaware that another murder is about to take place, the young widow gets pulled into the dark side of her small town, where looking away is no longer an option.
Overused plot points and underdeveloped characters mar Pomeroy's uneven debut, a contemporary mystery set in Bantam, N.Y., a small town with an alarmingly high body count. Amateur sleuths, unless they want irritated readers to yell at them, need a legitimate reason for poking into things, and they need to proceed sensibly. Abby Silvernale, a widowed 30-something waitress who works at a friend's restaurant, fails both tests. Readers don't learn enough about her to find convincing her willingness to hide in the shrubbery all night or to follow a suspected murderer on impulse. Abby's reluctance to involve the police endangers herself and others. Trapped in the restaurant kitchen with a psychopathic killer, she relies on the familiar device of keeping him talking in the hope help will soon arrive. Overall, the story feels fragmented and unfocused, and Abby isn't a strong enough protagonist to hold the scattered pieces together. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Robert Jordan
reviewed The Dark End of Town on October 31, 2009
The Dark End of Town
PROTAGONIST: Abby Silvernale, waitress
SERIES: Debut novel
RATING: 2.0
Located in upstate New York, Bantam is the kind of small town where you wouldn't expect anything much to be happening, other than the occasional rowdy drunk getting out of control or some teenaged horseplay. Abby Silvernale has been living there for a few years. Ever since her husband's suicide two years earlier, she's been working as a waitress at her friend Dulcie's restaurant. And now she finds herself intimately involved in a veritable crime wave.
First of all, someone has been "borrowing" Dulcie's minivan in the middle of the night and returning it, fully fueled, before dawn. Even though it's two o'clock in the morning, Abby rushes over to Dulcie's house when she calls about the situation. Abby ends up spending several hours hiding in a hedge trying to see who returns the van. Oooooo kayyyyyyy, I'm sure we'd all do something like that to help our friends, right?
Then the mother of a young teen boy who Abby has spoken to twice is killed, and he is immediately arrested. He calls on Abby to find him a lawyer and speak to his estranged father. And finally, a young woman goes missing. Her father, who has never met Abby before, pays her $500 to find information about his daughter's associates. Uh huh.
I think that writing a believable amateur sleuth type book must be one of the most difficult things for an author to pull off successfully. How do you take an ordinary person and place them in extraordinary situations while maintaining credibility? In The Dark End of Town, we're dealing with a waitress who hasn't been in town all that long and who lives with her two dogs in a trailer. It just doesn't work to place her in the middle of murders and mayhem and have her investigating as if she were a PI. She has no special skills that equip her to investigate anything other than where she placed her keys. She doesn't reach out to the police which endangers herself and others.
In spite of the credibility gap of placing this kind of character in these kinds of situations, I found Pomeroy to be a writer who shows great potential. I was really moved in the narrative sections where Abby is thinking about her late husband and the issues that they faced in their life together. The prose in those segments is lyrical and touching. Unfortunately, in other parts of the book, the writing is heavy handed and clumsy. There are numerous crude sexual references throughout that jarred me every time they appeared.
The Dark End of Town is a debut novel, and it's understandable that the author has some rough edges. In spite of my difficulties with the basic set-up, Pomeroy managed to pull off a few good twists. And even though Abby was out of her element and at times I found her irritating, she started to grow on me over the course of the book. Will I be reading the next in this series? No. But I do think that the reader who enjoys books featuring amateur sleuths will find The Dark End of Town entertaining and a bit different from the usual.
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